I look after the I.T. a local preschool, where they run two puppy powered PC's. Their main application is gCompris, but it is a very old version from three or four years ago. The chess game and the wires/bulbs/batteries dont work because it need gnuChess and gnuCap libraries. The puppy version in use is 2.15ce based Ecopup, modified with a kids theme. Puppy 2.15ce does not work/could not be got working with USB printers, so the kids cannot currently print out their drawings to take home since their old serial printer wore out.

Overall though, they are very proud of their Linux P.C.'s, and have asked our local council to look into linux for older schoolchildren in our area. We had to put a second computer in because the kids were squabbling over the one they had.

Our government has unfortunately been duped into a new contract that schools must purchase a Microsoft License for every computer it has, whether it is running Windows or not...or even if it is an Apple Mac. Currently in the area schools are paying to dispose of P4 2.8/512/40gb computers as "waste" because they wont run Windows Vista. Thankfully this does not apply to nursery education...yet.

The nursery has already passed several inspections from our inspectors at OFSTED, where their I.T. provision was marked with an "A", (the inspectors had never even heard of Linux before!) Im planning on getting some people in to do some studies into the preschool and publish the results as an example of how to save money AND provide better education to kids. Maybe we can get an A+ next time

Nursery education below age 3 is not paid for at all in Britain, and very minimally funded after that. The lack of I.T. overheads at the preschool means that the prices can be kept to an absolute minimum for the many low income families in the area. We do not charge a fee for looking after the computers, but the nursery agree to give one free child place a year in return. This originally went to our company secretaries child, but since she is now eligeable for funding the place is now given to another local child from a low-income home who has shown a particular gift for computers, but was struggling with his communication skills.

Gcompris is also very popular locally for kids home P.C.'s

I understand Gcompris takes a lot of skill to compile and package up....so here is some thanks in advance from a previously puppy-educated year of Children....

Write up of the story on our website here...Last edited by ecomoney on Sat 30 May 2009, 07:09; edited 7 times in total

I have a Edupup installation (on trial) ina nursery, with a veiw to get it in another 2 nurseries it has Gcompris on an old machine 128ram hdd install. The kids love it apparently.
It has Gcompris , supertux, Ri-li, Childsplay, Tuxmath and type, bugsquish, Concentration and other bits. They have said that some of the apps are a bit too difficult. Iwill get more info on which and post here.

I am also putting together a live cd from barebones 412 with gcompris on. The /usr/local/share/gcompris/boards/voices is about 50mb on its own. I removed all the languages with the exception of English and it reduced the size by 42mb. I will have to have a play and see if there are any adverse effects, apart from setting the localisation in the admin console. Again i will keep you informed

I used the gcompris 8.4.2 pet from http://www.giovelug.org/
The method to install is on http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=34135

I used Glsapt4 from this thread http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=28994 for the slackware packages (Pycairo, Pysqlite etc) and removed Gslapt after.

PS. I have done this on Edupup 3.01 and a Barebones 4.12Last edited by sidders on Wed 01 Apr 2009, 16:28; edited 1 time in total

Forgot to mention. The nursery applied for a grant to Rossendale council (i asume it is them as the nursery is in that area). They plan to upgrade their kit at HQ and the old kit will hopefully come to me as a result of this trial and i can Puppyfy them and get them into the other 2 nurseries, in different areas. This grant may be available in your area Ecopup.
I will see if i can get more details from the owners.

PS. there is a 8.5 prebuild out there. I am going to wait and see and then have a go at making a pet out of that.

However Gcompris is not one of them. Im currently looking at creating a new Ecopup 8 series distro (with a selection of kids games built in including gcompris) based on 4.2 or later. I wouldnt want to convert the kids over to a setup without gCompris at the moment because they are in the middle of working their way through it. They also have supertux 1, tuxpaint, tuxmath and tuxtype, supertux and tuxpaint being the ones they use the most.

Like I mentioned, I also collect from the local schools, and have quite a few (actually about 30!) P4/2.6/512/40gb Stone Desktop computers, and also a few smaller footprint 2.4 celeron/1gb/40gb desktop machines that just fly with any version of Puppy Linux on them. We also have a whole stack of keyboards/monitors and optical mice.

By the sounds of it, your short of hardware and were short of software. Bolton is basically just the other end of the M62 from us (were based in Scunthorpe for our sins), and I have a very economical car.

Perhaps we can annoy the banks a little more effectively than those on the BBC news today by doing a little bartering? _________________Puppy Linux's Mission

Let me give you my background. School> Squaddie (9 years) > Textiles (saw the writing on the manufacturing wall)> did a few MCP's and became a Helpdesk Monkey at Shell > Disappeared to South America for 9 months> IT support at a housing association, then back to Shell> had a kid and gave up work to be a full time dad, before you know it i've got 3 under 3!.> Had the Snip.
Since returning from South America, wireless was hitting the market so i set myself up settting wireless networks up for people until i found a job, but carried on, it invariably ended up doing all things M$ a peoples homes and my name got around and i look after a couple of small business's and a guy who has 3 private nurseries. I kept hold of a couple of old machines, but space is limited.
Tired of M$ and clearing up peoples viruses etc, i plumbed for Puppy as it will run on old hardware. Ubuntu (as someone in another postted pointed out) is brown and still requires a fair bit of Ram and countless updates are thrown at you. Came across Puppy in particular Edupup, Recycle + Open source + kids = perfect.

Thats my life story. I have just concentrated on the kids machines. The one on trial in one of the nurseries is Edupup with Tuxpuck, Tuxtype, Tuxmath, Childsplay, Abiword. I added Gcompris 8.4.2, Ri-li, Concentration, Bugsquish, Supertux.

Put a shortcut to /usr/x11R7/bin/wmpoweroff on the desktop and put a nice shut down symbol on it. I then hid all the menus, including Start by editing In a previous trial i discovered kids have a renamed /etc/xdg/templates/_jwmrc.root (to origonal) # everything else out.
Apart from My docs and the apps, there is nothing else left on the desktop. I also edited /etc/profiles and # by Touch boot.cnt (or something), then deleted /tmp/boot.cnt, then if the system crashes due to kids abillty to quadrouple click it will boot back to the desktop.

I will see if i can make Pets from the slackware dependencies (Pycairo etc)

I am also going to research the governments policy on IT for pre-schoolers. I do know they expect a kid to be able to use a mouse and open a program by the time they are 4.

This seems to work..at least without sound, on puppy 4.2. It throws many errors about missing dependencies when run from the command line. Also it is missing the chess libraries (gnuchess) and probably some others._________________Puppy Linux's Mission

I am fairly bored and need things to kill the 51 days until I join the Royal Marines so I will have a go at compiling a .pet of this tonight - unless you have been able to get the version you found working correctly.

Edit: I note that the latest version is 8.4.12, do you specifically need 8.3.11?

If I had the time I would compile it, But I don't, It would take a couple of days, The best way to do thisfor 4 series+ is basically
Download it and all the Dependant packages from Ubuntu Gutsy, Its the closest match to puppy 4.2.
http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/games/gcompris
I would download
http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/i386/gcompris/download
and
http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/all/gcompris-data/download
first then make a pet package and install it. It will tell you the missing libs, then go back to the gutsy/Gcompris page and download the corresponding missing packages, then uninstall your first test, and install the more actual one version 2. If you missing anything, it should be on one of the lib pages. If your still missing anything, just tell me and I'll see what I can do to help in the end.
ttuuxxx

Thanks for your help guys, I wont profess to know what on earth your talking about but it sounds like your making good progress.

@pcampbell87, making a superb childrens educational suite available to the worlds poorest is worthy work indeed. Its a shame that the food and wages arnt as good as in the military._________________Puppy Linux's Mission

I have built all the dependencies from source (all 40 of them!) however I am now getting an error 'cannot find -lpython2.6' when trying to make gcompris. I compiled python 2.6 from source when building the dependencies so I must have done something wrong at some point - back to the drawing board

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forumYou cannot attach files in this forumYou can download files in this forum